Chaos Corner V02 N07 02Aug92
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New Format for Chaos Corner
At long last, with nearly 300 published items, it has become necessary
for Dr. Chaos to get all of this organized. Even though yesterday was a
beautiful, cool, sunny day, Dr. Chaos spent his time going through all
the back issues putting in separator lines and item headers. Using the
WAIS software, he only has to enter a few keywords and up pops the
specific item he wants to see. Of course, this work will benefit more
than just Dr. Chaos. Look for announcements soon on how you can use
WAIS software on your PC, Macintosh, or Unix system to remotely search
the Chaos Corner archives.
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WAIS on RS/6000 AIX 3.1 information needed
Of course, one reason that the conversion of Chaos Corner to a set of
WAIS-index items took all day was that Dr. Chaos decided that he should
be running the latest version of the WAIS code (wais-8-b5). After much
futile effort, he was unsuccessful at getting it to compile on an
RS/6000 under AIX 3.1 (whereas the compiler does not complain about
apparently identical code in the previous version of wais). If anyone
has been successful at getting that version to compile, Dr. Chaos could
use some help.
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Gopher (Rice version) on CMS information needed
Yesterday was really one of frustration ... while Dr. Chaos was battling
with WAIS, I was trying to get the latest version of Rice Gopher working
in CMS. The latest version uses an operand LINEND (or something like
that) on the DEBLOCK command that our version of CMS Pipes doesn't seem
to like. Is it just that we are running an old version of PIPES or is
there something else I am missing? (The new version of Gopher is
necessary to use the Gopher-WAIS gateways that are available.)
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Major copyright faux pas -- Many apologies extended
Mark Dionne at Interleaf (a company known for its publishing software)
sent a red-faced Dr. Chaos the following note:
The article "Scientific Truth in Product Warning Labels" by Susan
Hewitt and Edward Subitzky, which appeared in Chaos Corner recently,
is copyrighted material from the Journal of Irreproducible Results,
of which I am Associate Editor. Please notify your readers, and
anyone else who may copy this article, that it is copyrighted. It
would also be helpful if you would tell your readers that
subscriptions to the Journal can be obtained by contacting:
Blackwell Scientific Publishing, Inc.
Three Cambridge Center
Cambridge, MA 02142
(617) 225-0401
Mark was also nice enough to subscribe to Chaos Corner (welcome); I hope
for more reasons than to watch out for copyright violations.
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Catching Alligators
Here's one more try at humor -- this from Bob Blackmun, and I certainly
would think that anyone would be embarrassed to have the copyright on
this one:
To catch an alligator, you take a telescope, a box of matches, a pair of
tweezers and dull book to a house in the Everglades. You go inside the
house and make sure that all the windows and doors are locked securely,
except one small window that you open. Then you go outside and walk
around until an alligator spots you. When he does, you let him chase you
back to the house, and you go inside and lock the door. Then, sit down
in the most comfortable chair in the house and begin to read the book.
Since it is a dull book, you will fall asleep very quickly. Meanwhile,
the alligator runs around and around the house, looking for a way to get
inside. Finally, he sees the small window and climbs in. Imagine his
surprise to find you asleep! Wondering why, he picks up your book and
begins to read. Since it is a *dull* book, the alligator also falls
asleep very quickly. Since you fell asleep first, you wake up first,
pick up the telescope and look at the alligator through the wrong end,
pick him up with the tweezers and put him in the match box!
And that's how you catch an alligator!
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A Unix clone for the 386 - Linux
Nicolai Langfeldt (janl@ifi.uio.no) from Norway points out the great
amount of activity around a rapidly developing Unix clone for the Intel
386 architecture. He writes:
Heard about linux? A very nice unix clone for i386 machines, and if
you've got a video card mit's stock X11R5 server for 386 supports, you
get X11 as well! A must for all computer nuts! In principle you can run
it on two diskettes, but it's better to run it on a HD (let's say
minimum 10Mb partition). 4Mb mem should be enough to do some things, if
you add 4Mb of swap (or real RAM) you can do much more, and so on.
Linux enthusiasts meet in the newsgroup comp.os.linux, and on irc
channel named #linux. For the even more enthusiastic there is a mailing
list (linux-activists).
Linux is evolving rapidly, Linus (the author..., A 3'rd yr CS student at
Univ. in Helsinki, Finland) releases weekly patches, and a lot of people
are contributing to it, with kernel fixes, X11 was ported by 3rd party,
scsi disk drivers, and _lots_ more! It's POSIX compliant and pretty
stable. Most of the programs are ports of GNU software of-course...
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OS/2 and FAX software
As Dr. Chaos will loudly agree, DOS or Windows software for using fax
boards or modems do not seem to get along with OS/2. The discussions on
the net seem to be in favor of two products that work well with OS/2:
BitFax and PMFax. The two programs are reported to be similar except
that PMFax supports the Intel SatisFAXtation (and some other proprietary
boards). Perhaps by the next issue, Dave Gomberg at UC San Francisco
will be able to report on his experiences?
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New versions of Frequently Asked Questions
It's the start of a new month, so the new FAQ postings are starting to
roll out. Recent arrivals include new postings for the nn newsreader
and the mh mail system (both in Unix) and a new version of the FAQ for
OS/2. Let Dr. Chaos know at chaos-request@pelican.cit.cornell.edu if
you need copies of any of these.
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Having trouble with Windows 3.1? You need WDL!
Microsoft issues updates to drivers associated with Windows 3.1 by
making them available on their BBS and on CompuServe. (It is known as
the Windows Drivers Library.) Many of these updates also make their way
to the Internet Windows archive, ftp.cica.indiana.edu. The drivers for
a very LARGE number of printers have been updated, along with video
drivers, the CD-ROM driver, the Solitaire game, the MSDOS executive, and
many more. Let Dr. Chaos know at chaos-request@pelican.cit.cornell.edu
if you would like a copy of the list of updated software (the file is
over 300 lines long).
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Windows version of LOGO
The wonderfully popular Apple ][ software called Logo is now available
for Windows -- and it is free! Version 1.1 of the software has just
been released to UseNet so expect it soon on a Windows archive near you.
If you just can't wait, I did put a copy under the name mswlogo1.zip on
puffin.cit.cornell.edu. (Don't forget to use 'binary' before you
transfer it to your machine.)
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Fixes available to X11R5 (would you believe #16 is the latest?)
A large number of fixes have been made available to the MIT X Window
System Version 11 Release 5 software. As usual, all fixes are available
at export.lcs.mit.edu, or you can get them locally (to Cornell) on
pelican.cit.cornell.edu in the /pub/X11R5 directory.
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What does Dr. Chaos know about WAIS?
I know, ever since you started this issue, you have been wondering what
I was talking about with searching, indexing, and that stuff. Dr. Chaos
has mentioned (and been corrected) about WAIS before, but he is willing
to try again. Actually, the real motivation is that last October, Rick
Cochran sent Dr. Chaos a mail file asking the question above, and Dr.
Chaos COULDN'T STAND to admit that he didn't know much at all about one
of the exciting new developments in accessing information across the
Internet. Having had much more exposure in the past several weeks, he
is willing to try again (and he is confident that the gentle readers
will correct him if he goes astray).
Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) are now available across the
Internet on a broad range of topics (currently over 250 servers freely
advertise their archives). Keywords for the information topics
available at each server is maintained on a Connection Machine at The
Thinking Machines Corporation (think.com). This directory-of-servers is
the "root level" of a query which can then allow you to search all the
servers at one time that appear to have information you need. Queries
with a large number of keywords may return a correspondingly large
number of items, but the items are scored by "relevance" and those with
high scores are presented first. The amazing capability of WAIS is the
ability to refine a search by selecting articles YOU find to be
relevant, and telling the search engine to "go find me more articles
like these". That very powerful capability along with being able to
store queries and re-execute them later goes a long way in turning the
veritable flood of network data into a manageable stream of network
information.
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How can I get more information about WAIS?
The fastest way to get more information is to use telnet to access
quake.think.com and login as user 'wais'. That will allow you to use
WAIS to search for information about WAIS. (It does help to be at some
terminal that can emulate a vt100, in fact, Dr. Chaos can guarantee that
it doesn't work usefully to attempt telnet from a 3270 session.)
Software to access WAIS servers currently exists for the Macintosh, for
the PC using the Clarkson Packet Drivers, for the PC using Windows and
FTP Software's TCP/IP protocol stack, for Unix (there is a 'diff' file
to get it working on an RS/6000 and AIX), and there is a very nice X
Windows implementation. If you have the latest version of Gopher
available to you, there are a number of Gopher/WAIS gateways that allow
searches (but not necessarily all the features are available).
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Are there useful things for WAIS besides searches?
Dr. Chaos normally stores items of interest using RiceMail ... which
puts the items in files called "notebooks" with each items separated by
a row of + signs. It took Dr. Chaos (and he doesn't know very much
about C at all) about 15 minutes to define a new file structure type for
RiceMail that gave Dr. Chaos the ability to index all his mail files for
almost instant retrieval! No more need to keep multiple copies of files
(should the item about fax software under OS/2 be fined under OS/2 or
should it be under FAX?) In fact, it's not necessary to file it
ANYWHERE! ... just drop it into any old notebook and WAIS will allow you
to pull it out again.
Of course. many file formats are already handled, for instance the
format of this Chaos Corner required no changes. All in all, it's very
easy to either fit the data to the software or fit the software to the
data ... as you choose.
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That's all for now ... I'm back to using Word for Windows and I'm over
10,000 characters again (but this time I will use a spell checker). Act
now and don't delay, it's easy to subscribe -- just send your request
off to chaos-request@pelican.cit.cornell.edu.
Dr. Chaos (I have a Master's Degree)